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If odds-makers have it right, the San Francisco 49ers will beat the Baltimore Ravens by four points during Sunday's Super Bowl XLVII. But a Los Angeles investment firm says that spread is too generous and bettors should take the Ravens.

The reasoning behind the call points to some investment moves, too.

Analytic Investors is a quant shop, meaning it uses computer models to tell which investments to buy and sell. For the past nine years the firm's analysts have applied quantitative analysis to picking teams in Super Bowls, covering the spread in all but the most recent one (which it points out came down to a single dropped pass).

The methodology involves creating an "alpha" for all 32 teams in the National Football League. Finance junkies know that alpha is the return an investor secures after adjusting for the risk he takes. The best money managers beat the market while holding risk in check, thereby generating positive alpha. For the NFL, Analytic Investors defines each team's alpha as the return on investment earned by making a "money line" bet on each of its games during the prior season. Money line bets don't have point spreads; instead, they have higher payoffs for underdogs and lower ones for favorites.

One way for a team to generate heaps of alpha, then, is to enter a season as the subject of low expectations and then outperform. This year's alpha champ, the Indianapolis Colts, returned 59.2% for gamblers. Plenty of teams bettered its 11-win season, but none did so after winning just two games the year before. At the other extreme, the Jacksonville Jaguars won just twice and lost 68.5% for bettors.

San Francisco enters the Super Bowl with an alpha of 23.1%, versus 2.3% for Baltimore. So why bet on the lower earner? One of the things Analytic Investors has noticed in digging through its football data is that alphas tend to reverse after each season. The big winners attract high expectations, which crimp betting returns.

"Oddsmakers tend to overreact to recent events, just like market participants," says Matt Robinson, an analyst with the firm.

Investors betting on performance reversals now might want to favor utility stocks, which were the worst among sectors in the Standard & Poor's 500 index last year, with a 2.9% loss. The group now yields about 4%, and Morningstar points out that the spread between that number and the 10-year Treasury yield of 2% is much larger than it was before utilities rallied big in 2011. Earnings growth for the group is slow, but if coal plant closures forced by tighter emissions regulations cause power prices to rise, that could change in a hurry for stronger utilities.

Another finding from Analytic Investors is that low-volatility teams, steady performers whose alphas don't change much from year to year, produce better gambling returns than others. You win only moderate amounts on these teams, but they pay off much more often than long shots, says Robinson.

That's another plus for utilities: Share price volatility for the sector has been half that of the broad stock market over the past five years.